Kid Montana was the brainchild of Jean-Marc Lederman, a synth
freak who started out with the punk band Digital Dance, moved to London in the
early eighties (played gigs with The The, Frank Tovey, Gene Loves Jezebel ...)
and started out with Kid Montana as a solo-experiment. A first single "Statistics
Mean Nothing When You Get On The Wrong Plane" was issued in 1982.

A year later, Lederman met Washington-born Dudley Kludt, a singer
who had meandered to Belgium and got stuck here in the then flourishing avant-garde-wave
residing in Brussels (eg. Anna Domino, Paul Haig, Tuxedomoon ...). In 1983, the
first release (with Lederman on most of the instruments, Kludt doing the vocals
and Michel Zyl & Phil Wauquaire (both ex-Digital Dance on bass & drums)
was released on Antler Records : the result ended up a being a mix of Japan &
Soft Cell called "Revisiting Yalta".

After this, the band moved to Les Disques du Crépuscule,
and recorded a mini-album "The Las Vegas God Rush", with Marc
Moulin (Telex, Placebo ...) behind the knobs.

One year later, the producer became Gilbert Lederman (earlier
with Bernthöler etc, later A&R man for record
company EMI-Belgium). The result, the album "Temperamental" is still
worth hearing today, and showed quite a mixture of influences such as Aztec Camera,
Marc Almond, Tuxedomoon, and some pieces even coming closer to Front 242 ... On
the album, there were guest-appearances of Anna Domino
(vocals on Love & Trouble & Joey came back home), Marc
Moulin on guitar & string, and even Eric Melaerts - see Soulsister,
Yasmine etc... - on guitar. The end result was reviewed
in "Mad in Belgium" as "garagerockers won't be able to get wild
with "Temperamental", industrial adepts won't get numbed down by it,
and avant-gardist won't find a deeppsychological and socio-economic analysis.
But this album is BEAUTIFUL".

One track of the album "Spooky" (the only cover of the
album, of the song made famous by Classics IV) was later also released as a single
without mentioning who was behind it, so this single can both be attributed to
Kid Montana or The Weathermen (another project of
Lederman, with Bruce Geduldig of Tuxedomoon, which enjoyed a little bit more fame
than Kid Montana later on).

Although this album ("dedicated to the four-letter word
that makes the world go round")was well-received and still enjoys some
cult fame to this date, this is where the story of Kid Montana ended.

Dudley Kludt (or Dudley Klute) was last spotted as one of The
Three Terrors (a project with a cover programme of vocalists who "sing the
saddest songs they know", with Stephin Merritt & Ld Beghtol) or as a
guest on Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" (a NY band of Stephin Merritt
again). Jean-Marc Lederman went on with The Weathermen, later did some composing
for CD-Roms or Alain Bashung.

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